Here are my tutorial slides from the Velocity Santa Clara Conference, June 24.  There were lots of great questions from the audience, and discussion continued… I have an Office Hour tomorrow as well, in case folks think of questions they didn’t ask today!

The Practical Gamemaster: Design & Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills

Emergency drills must be planned within a broad context of emergency response, emergency operations, business continuity planning/resiliency, disaster recovery, and information technology architecture. This tutorial will give that broader context, first providing some perspective on goals and personnel involved in the following:

• Emergency response: “Respond”
• Emergency operations: “Assess, Report, Recover”
• Business continuity planning and resiliency: Business Impact Analysis, Threat and Risk Analysis, Recovery Point Objectives, and Recovery Time Objectives
• Disaster recovery and information technology architecture

That will be followed by key concepts in emergency operations center and incident headquarters design, methods of introducing such concepts to attendee’s organizations, and a sequence of basic-to-advanced drill designs.

The emergency drill design portion begins with a typical life-safety drill, progresses through basic and advanced IT emergency operations drills, and concludes with guru-level additions to drill design. The more advanced drill designs will allow attendees to build upon and include the features and components of earlier basic drills without overburdening their teams with too many simulations.

Keeping a large group of intelligent IT folks engaged in a drill simulation can be very challenging. Attendees will leave this tutorial ready to design effective drills to better prepare their organizations for likely emergencies and realistic function failures.

Slides: The Practical Gamemaster: Design & Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills